Neither of which would've been incorrect - had we continued down the path of relying on coal, or oak, we would have run out of both, and needed to start importing.



Ideas are wonderful things, it's just a shame that the economics and ecologic realities don't align with what we'd like to do. A billion more people in the Asian continent doesn't equate to a solution for free and abundant energy for everyone and an end to overfishing and over farming leading to desertification or ocean acidification.



Our oil requirements are outstripping the available reserves. The point where the energy requirement to get at and process the stuff will, soon, start to reach the point where it'll require more than the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil to produce that barrel of oil. At which point, oil ceases to make any form of economic (let alone ecological) sense.
Turning over grasslands to modern agriculture - let's pause for a moment and see what might happen there, from a political and ecological point of view.
As it stands, we do in fact produce enough food to feed the planet. It's just being wasted due to a number of factors.



If you also hadn't noticed, a lot of that water isn't terribly useful. To make it useful, we need energy to alter it. Which returns us to the point about oil and gas availability, and the economics of making it profitable.

Economic reality is that a scarce commodity becomes expensive, which provides an incentive to both produce more and consume less. New technologies such as horizontal drilling for instance incur a large up front development cost and are only viable in the first instance when oil prices are high. As the techniques are refined the costs plummet and thus shale oil becomes relatively cheap. This is perfectly standard, cars, computers, air travel, all were initially hugely expensive. In the 1960s North Sea oil was considered unaffordable.

This is all driven by dynamic, educated people having ideas, and by investors that back them. As educational standards rise in highly populated regions (India, China, Brazil) , and as investment expertise grows there too, then so we can say with certainty they will come up with solutions to problems. Europe and North America already have deep pools of those talents, and those have led to us moving beyond oak battleships and coal powered trains. Useful new ideas still arrive rapidly in the developed world, and to those we should expect to add even more that emerge from the emerging world.

The pace of technical development therefore is unlikely to slow, and the financial gains that can be realised by deploying those ideas are sufficiently motivating to expect them to come to pass.As I already indicated, I don't see much prospect for money or tech to repair screwed fisheries; the other complaints you have are clearly addressable through investment and technology though, so they will be.

There's masses of hydrocarbons available that don't require more energy to extract than they provide, even oil sands aren't as bad as that, your claim is pure fantasy. Peak oil capacity is such a distant prospect that peak oil demand is likely to be reached first. North American shale gas for instance is now replacing crude in much of the petrochemicals industry in that region. This innovation will spread if oil becomes more expensive relative to natural gas.

Sub Saharan Africa doesn't need to turn over new land to agriculture to do all that I said and more. Roads to get goods to market, proper distribution of fertilisers, some agricultural machinery, canneries, and professional services to help farmers select the best fertiliser and seed for their fields would lead to an exponential increase in yield from the same land that is already under the plough.

Desalination is viable tech now, furthermore it improves in regular increments. Unless you are of the belief that further improvement to it is impossible, then you must agree that it can be used in at least some cases to solve a water shortage. So there is no problem here.


<Edit> why did the forum refuse to accept that last paragraph until I cut and pasted it into a seperate reply?

The cost of these new technologies to get at these hydrocarbons is only becoming 'cheaper' because the price when released to market is rising. This has a knock on effect in our usage.



All the good ideas in the world rely on availablilty of resources to make fruition. We need to rely on the exploitation of our surroundings to make them happen, and we therefore need to ensure a balance between what we take out and what can be replenished in a sensible time frame. The fisheries are a prime example - we'll cause extinction which will have numerous knock on effects unless we stand back and let things restock.




I'd recommend looking at the work of Chris Martenson.
Specifically you can dip in here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8WBiTnBwSWc#t=992 - but I'd suggest you watch the entire presentation and understand the nature of exponential population growth and what that means for the consumption of materials.
The idea that technology and good ideas is a panacea is a charming notion, but I suspect the economic and political realities knock it into a cocked hat.

We did a thread on Chris Martenson a year or two ago. I pointed out a number of startlingly obvious flaws at the time, I'm certainly not going to waste another hour going though that sub standard gibberish again to remember them all. It's pure [LIFTED] spun up for an audience of outstanding stupidity - I do still shudder to remember how stupid the Q&A at the end was. One serious flaw was his dishonesty. He goes on about exponential rates of things until it doesn't suit him any more, and then he pretends they aren't a factor. Spend a few seconds thinking about his comment on sailing ships, you should be able to work out why that is a problem without any further prompting.

The cost of a new thing is always high relative to its later price as it becomes a standard (assuming it is useful enough to become one). Shale oil and gas have only recently become economically viable to extract, they will become increasingly so because that is how these things work. The technology that made it possible in the first place has already been significantly refined and lots more R&D is going on all the time.
Furthermore, I already pointed out to you that this happened before many times. I gave the example of the North Sea - the deep drilling tech required there was prohibitively expensive initially, an oil shock made it worth pursuing eventually, and then the technology matured and became cheap enough that it was still worth extracting when the oil price fell again. Improvements on that technology have subsequently made many other challenging reserves equally viable.

Conversely, there is now a spreading belief that Brazil has blown its opportunity with the pre-sal oil fields that contain so many billions of barrels. They also need expensive new technology, but they have been too slow to ramp up that investment, and so it is becoming unlikely that they will be able to compete now against shale which has a huge head start and even larger reserves available. However, should oil remain such a vital commodity, and should demand continue to grow, then they will be in a good investment position again some day, when I am sure they will capitalise. However, just as supply peaks, so invariably does demand. Estimates for peak demand on oil vary widely, but the range from end of this decade to middle of next looks realistic to many. If that peak prediction is accurate, then the likelihood is that Brazil will have to leave billions of barrels of oil beneath the ocean salt.

Good ideas rely on making better use of the available resources, or finding new resources to replace depleted or expensive ones. A new business model, for obvious reasons, will never include just taking the same thing and doing the same thing to it as the old one.



Technology, good ideas, and investment are the basic drivers of a material progress. They propelled your ancestors from cave dwelling oaf to farming. They created a society so rich that we only use a couple of people out of every hundred to provide food for us all (the cave dwellers all gathered and foraged - the pre industrial farming societies all used 90% of the labour force to provide subsistence). The range of problems, large and small, that have been conquered by these forces is incalculable. They are how things work, politics can only mildly hinder them, and economics is defined by them.

Of course, you're welcome to dismiss his points, but perhaps we both agree that as the price of the resource increases, then it becomes economically viable to invest in the more intensive pricey technology that returns less of a surplus than picking up the easy stuff.
Can we also agree on the fact that to raise the population of the earth to our present standard of living will require vastly more raw materials, such as copper and silver, than there are present on the planet? We already consume more than we can replace (or allow nature to replace), so perhaps you can explain how more people = success, prosperity and a new arcadia?

Even in Asia where the Green revolution in food production shot up the past has reached a peak now. For the last few years the production of rice which has shot up since the 60's has now stabilised, and looks like peaking. The switching of Asians in general from a more vegetarian diet to a more western diet has also impacted land use and water use significantly. Hence the recent suggestion that in future we start to eat insects for protein if we are to feed ourselves.

Yes on the first - it's meaningless though. That's only one of the viable outcomes.

No on the second, far from it. Nature doesn't replace silver, its manufacturing ceased before ours began. The amount of silver we require for what we do now and how we do it is no indicator of any future reliance on more of it. There's lots of it still, enough to last for a long time, and it can be replaced with things that are not silver.

I'm not actually sure what the venerable sir's point is. The article reads like disjointed excerpts from a rambling conversation.

His comment about human kind no longer evolving is one that has caused many people concern since at least the fifties, but eugenics are generally frowned upon. However, genetic testing prior to marriage is increasingly common in some cultures with the aim of reducing the prevalence of certain genetic weaknesses.

With regards to large families, I imagine his concern is twofold. Firstly for the wellbeing of the family, but given what he is famous for I guess he's talking about global biodiversity.

Regarding sustainability of world populations of tens or hundreds of billions, I don't think we should be asking whether it is possible. I think we should be asking if it's desirable. There plenty of dystopian fictions to dwell on.

He's 87. I bet most of his conversations are rambling.

Maybe, but I'm sure he probably had some point in mind which is lost in translation.

My dad's about the same age and is no more random than when he was young.

Thing is, to raise the rest of the world to our technological standard - implementing a national grid and telecoms and all the associated technology that we enjoy - would require at least another Earth's worth of copper. Clearly, and despite whatever recycling efforts we make, we don't have a spare Earth.
The same goes for the oceans - what we take (and perhaps more importantly, what we put in) far out strips what can be absorbed by nature. And that's a huge problem caused by population increase.
As for the silver issue, there is in fact, a supply issue. People are stockpiling it because the output is decreasing. We're approaching the point where the silver in the ground is less than the silver available. Certain German car manufacturers are stock piling it because their favoured 'just in time' supply model doesn't work any more with this element. As an economic whizz, you must know what happens to the price of a scarce resource.
This isn't going to improve - more silver isn't going to become available.
The Earth is a finite resource, and each year we use more. Each year, we have more people, demanding more resources from an ecological system that can't presently sustain the demands we make upon it.
While I salute your fond notion that 'more tech' is a practical answer, the question of 'how much?' (in both economic and political terms), 'how?' and 'when?' are the key issues here.
'When?' being particularly pertinent, when concerned with the acidification of the ocean, something that's happening more or less because of 'more tech'. It's a massive, understated problem, and not something that's about to be solved by consuming more resources to manufacture more tech.
At some point, in the future, there will simply be too many people on the planet and bad things will happen to a lot of them, and the ecosystem we inhabit. That's something that no amount of Wired subscriptions in Asia or copies of Mondo2000 sent to Africa is going to solve.

There's plenty of oil, coal etc, whether we should be burning the stuff is a whole other debate.

I have no doubt that technology will deliver the means to feed and clothe us, but climate change is a serious concern.

Yes we have probably a century of oil left, even though oil production peaked around 2006. The cheap easy oil is all gone so while it will be around for another century will most people be able to afford it? There is also around 400 years of coal available as well. Technology will go a long way towards solving many problems of oil, coal and gas but as you said they may never be able to use it because of climate change.

Bull [LIFTED].